Table of the Permeability of Various Substances to Roentgen Rays

Discussion

FROM THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO’S CATALOG

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered x-rays on November 8, 1895, and announced his surprising find in a scientific paper at the end of that year. Within days, newspapers everywhere had picked up the story, and the x-ray's manifold applications to science and society began to be explored. Just a few months later, the Austrian chemists Josef Maria Eder and Eduard Valenta replicated Röntgen's experiments and made improvements to his apparatus, publishing their research in a booklet accompanied by fifteen photogravure images depicting objects and animals. In this image, they showed the responsiveness of a variety of materials (metals, glass, bone, wood, rubber, and more) to the x-ray, showing a range of permeability that is represented as different shades of gray. This elegant arrangement of samples from the darkest black to nearly white suggests a fundamental compatibility between scientific and aesthetic ordering principles in the nineteenth century.

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